Staff Blog
The Future of Nature: Writing on a Human Ecology from Orion Magazine
posted by lori litchman
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"The most
common words I hear spoken by any environmentalist anywhere are, We’re fucked."
So begins
the essay, "Beyond Hope," one in a collection ofmany in Orion magazine’s best-of compilation The Future of Nature, which focuses on the rarely positive interaction
between humans and natural world.
The book -
divided into Action, Refugees, Boundaries, Reverence Monsters and Native -
includes work by well-known nature writers like Barry Lopez and Wendell Berry,
and deals with topics ranging from a grass roots group fighting to stop the
construction of a Target in BK Loren’s essay, "Got Tape?" to a story that might
make one think twice before putting in vinyl flooring in your home. In her
essay, "The Pirates of Illiopolis," Sandra Steingraber takes a close look at a
polyvinyl chloride plant in Illinois
and the effects of an explosion there.
And while
Al Gore’s talk of climate refugees in An
Inconvenient Truth was sobering, how about conservation organizations
kicking people off of their land instead of things like floods or other natural
disasters? In "Conservation Refugees," Mark Dowie takes a critical look at
organizations like The Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund and
asserts that they, among others, occasionally help "relocate" or "resettle" native
peoples so their land can be protected.
"Not to be
confused with ecological refugees – people forced to abandon their homelands as
a result of unbearable heat, drought, desertification, flooding, disease, or
other consequences of climate chaos – conservation refugees are removed from
their lands involuntarily, either forcibly or through a variety of less
coercive measures," writes Dowie.
Although
didactic at points throughout the book, the essays provide a glimpse at the
burgeoning and many-faceted debates regarding the environment. Some essays,
like "Beyond Hope," deserve a close reading, while others can be skimmed.
